Neverwinter Nights 2

Pretty Craptastic

D+

Nov 13, 2006 7:18PM PST

I waited with impatience for this game to ship and now wish I'd have been in a coma and missed it.

As the professional reviewer stated the camera is lesson in patience, and is an incredible step backwards from NWN1. The OC is full of bugs, and is very linear. It lacks exploration and has a general feel that you are in a lifeless, empty world where your every step is limited. Want to enter that house to see what's inside? You can't unless it's a scripted part of the story. Want to kill that peasant for some imagined crime? You can't they are invincible.

Sometimes entire cutscenes fail to fire, and you're left scratching your head as to what happened. The story itself is ok, nothing groundbreaking but better than NWN1's original story. The graphics are terrible based on just about any other game out there for the last 2-3 years. I actually believe some of the models from NWN1 are better.

People have pointed out that the toolset is more than worth the price. Well I'd beg to differ. It's buggy too, and you have to trick it into doing what you'd want it to do. Also, from what I've experienced first hand, the modules you make don't seem to run any better on the broken graphics engine than the ones that obsidian made. I'll admit I'm no module guru, but even an almost empty outdoor area doesn't get extremely good FPS. The file sizes are atrocious, and I think that without some major workaround the player hosted persistent worlds are all but dead on NWN2.

I'm saddened to think this franchise has come to this. I can only hope that Obsidian makes good on trying to patch this mess into something that most people can enjoy.